Peter Sunde isn't letting international charges against him get him down

Peter
Sunde (alias brokep), the co-founder of the troubled torrent
giant The Pirate Bay, is a divisive figure in the tech
community. Worldwide he has been found guilty of multiple
criminal charges for giving people the ability to find torrents,
both illegal
and legal. While Sunde never forced anyone to choose to
pirate material or post illegal torrents to TPB, his critics say
he was aiding and abetting violations. His advocates say that
such charges are ludicrous and a sign of a broken copyright system
worldwide.

Sunde is currently facing a one
year prison sentence in his native Sweden and millions in
fines for "assisting [others
in] copyright infringement".
The guilty verdict is being
appealed, after it was revealed that the judge in the case was
affiliated with several copyright protection
organizations.

Undeterred by his sticky legal predicament,
Sunde made
an appearance via Skype at the South by South West
Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. Sunde could not make a
personal trip to the U.S., as he currently has an arrest warrant over
piracy charges in the U.S.

In the conference Sunde says that
he understands that piracy is a forbidden fruit of sorts. He
states, "This idea has been discussed for hundreds of years. Not
everything people do is good – people make Coca Cola and some
people want it and some people don't, but we don't outlaw it."

When
asked if piracy was like a cold Coke, he replies, "No, the
Pirate Bay is more like sugar – it's bad for you but you can't stop
using it. Bad because you get sued for it."

He also jokes
about courting Google
cofounder Sergey Brin to try to get him to change his
policies. He states, "I would tell [Brin] he needs to
change. I would make him somehow. I can be very persuasive – I
don't mean that in a bad way, I can be very funny and make him like
me, and want to marry me and then I will write it in a pre-nup and
then divorce him."

As to the pending three
strikes proposals in the UK and other countries, Sunde
comments, "Of course people have to have a system in place to be
able to share and every country will have to do what they want
surrounding that, as long as they don't infringe on freedom of speech
and access to knowledge, which kind of sets the barrier quite high."

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

I was listing countries from a list on Wikipedia so I never claimed I was 100% correct. I obviously didn't do research for hours just to reply on a thread.

The point is the copyright rules are not uniform everywhere, some have lifetime + 75 years copyright, some have copyright just the Berne convention, some countries consider educational works (school manuals) differently (less or no copyright), some consider certain works (like snapshots of paintings) non-copyrightable and so on.

It's impossible for a website that accepts works from people around the world to know if a specific work in a specific country is still copyrighted or not. And even if it's no longer copyrighted in a country, a person in another country may commit copyright infringement by downloading it because the work is still copyrighted in his country.

These decisions should not be handled by the website but by courts who can investigate copyright claims from companies by requesting documents and proofs of copyright ownership.The users posting the works are also responsible, not the users, just like Youtube is not responsible for users' videos or how telephone companies are not responsible if two people plan a crime using their phones.

Anyways, the fact that some have signed international treaties doesn't mean a thing, when US itself doesn't respect and doesn't want to accept international laws and rulings.

For example, US does not allow its people to gamble outside the country (by banning credit card processors from allowing transactions with gambling websites) but allows them to gamble inside the country AND allows people outside US to gamble online on US casinos.

For this reason, some islands with casinos have sued the United States in international courts and won but US igores the ruling and doesn't feel like respecting it. However, when it gets a ruling that's good for them, they immediately start to complain.

As US still doesn't allow people in US to use casinos outside the country, those islands sued again and were granted the right to infringe on US intellectual property (as a remedy) until they commit infringement in value of 15 million dollars. (or a sum close the that)

If you write "it's wrong" you might as well fart in the wind if you think that is a compelling argument.

I accept some level if intelectual property protection is needed in modern society. I do not accept that the system as it stands is workable or sustainable.

You might be surprised how easily you yourself may end up running afoul of copyright laws because they have been pushed to extreme measures in some cases. If we can't fairly apply a law then that law needs to change.

See how it works? I used "fairly", another opinion that like yours is not a universally held fact.